Explore "The Love of England" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Love of country is general to mankind, yet is not the love of country a general thing to be described by a general title. Love changes with the object of love. The country loved determines the nature of its services.
The love of England has in it the love of landscape, as has the love of no other country: it has in it as has the love of no other country, the love of friends. Less than the love of other countries has it in it the love of what may be fixed in a phrase or well set down in words. It lacks, alas, the love of some interminable past nor does it draw its liveliness from any great succession of centuries. Say that ten centuries made a soil, and that in that soil four centuries more produced a tree, and that that tree was England, then you will know to what the love of England is in most men directed. For most men who love England know so little of her first thousand years that when they hear the echoes of them or see visions of them, they think they are dealing with a foreign thing. All Englishmen are clean cut off from their long past which ended when the last Mass was sung at Westminster.